Beautiful Lie the Dead (12 page)

He ducked back behind the gas station to the far edge of the grocery parking lot. Heading back into the store, he retraced his steps and re-emerged near his truck with his grocery bag back in plain view. He was into his truck and already sitting at the light two blocks up by the time the first cruiser came screaming down the Vanier Parkway with its blue and red lights flashing.

He drove on. Figured if they did manage to connect him to the scene, he could say he'd gone to the nearest pay phone to report it because his cell phone was dead, and he'd been too shaken up to stick around.

* * *

The call came in to the Incident Command Centre at 3:54 p.m., fifteen minutes after Frankie Robitaille's initial 911 call. The first responders had confirmed the sighting of a frozen human hand in a snowbank, which at first glance appeared to be female, but since the body had been only partially excavated, they were requesting direction.

Green's heart sank. Not matter how much you steeled yourself for such an outcome, you always hoped. He forced himself to think through his sorrow. Partially excavated, he wondered. By whom, and why?

Still on the phone, he headed down the hall towards his office. “Are there footprints in the vicinity?”

“Yes, sir,” said the patrolman, whose voice had cracked slightly. He sounded young. Probably his first body. “I didn't disturb them.”

“Good work,” Green said. “Secure the whole area, protect the footprints, and look for more arriving and leaving the scene. Teams are on their way.”

“Should—should I contact the coroner, sir?”

Green had already reached his office and was pulling on his jacket, wedging the phone against his shoulder. At this point there was no indication the death was suspicious—indeed, hypothermia was the most likely cause—but the fact that someone had deliberately dug it up, on an obscure side street nowhere near Meredith's usual locations, raised a red flag. He wanted the expertise of a forensic pathologist rather than the routine coroner.

“I'll call Dr. MacPhail and Ident,” he told the patrolman. “Your main concern is to secure that scene.”

He rode with the duty inspector, and on the drive over, they listened to the 911 tape. Dispatch had identified the origin as a pay phone on Beechwood Avenue, the nearest main street to the scene and likely the nearest pay phone. It was a male caller who spoke English with no discernible accent, and to Green's practised ear, he sounded shaken up. But the muffled tone suggested he was also trying to disguise his voice. Another red flag. From the passenger seat of the inspector's cruiser, Green radioed the dispatcher again.

“Send a unit to secure that pay phone until an Ident team can check it out.” Half an hour had passed since the call, but with any luck there might still be fingerprints. Not too many people used pay phones any more.

By the time they arrived at Maple Lane, a crowd of about twenty had gathered around an area halfway up the block. Two police cruisers were parked diagonally to block access to the spot, and yellow tape had been strung in a large semi-circle in the road. Onlookers craned their necks and several people were taking pictures with their cell phones, dragging voyeurism down to new depths in Green's opinion. No sign yet of the media, but they'd soon join the voyeurs.

He left the duty inspector to manage the crowd and ignored the barrage of questions as he pushed through. The hand looked unreal, reaching up through the snow like a prop in a bad Halloween horror flick. It was a left hand, small and delicate with its nails painted a metallic turquoise that looked garish against the waxy white skin. He felt a twinge of intrigue. Meredith Kennedy was reportedly wearing a large diamond engagement ring. This hand had no rings, nor any circular marks on the skin to suggest where a ring used to be.

He stayed well back, respecting the integrity of the crime scene while he studied the snow. It bore the deep, straight cuts of a shovel in a line all the way along the bank, as if someone had been systematically searching. Numerous overlapping boot prints were visible in the snow, large and deeply treaded like a man's work boot. Each was marked with an Ident number.

“There's a purse too, sir,” said the young patrolman, pointing to a red object about ten feet away. He sounded in control now, excited by his role in the drama.

“Did you search it?”

“Yes, sir, there was no ID.” The patrolman looked alarmed, as if realizing he'd overstepped. “But I put it back where it was.”

The purse lay on top of the snowbank. The snow beneath it was undisturbed, but beside it was a large hole scored with glove marks as if someone had been digging through the snow.

The duty inspector joined him. “What do you think?”

“I think our mystery man found the purse first, checked it, tossed it aside and then began to search the snowbank for the body. Maybe he spotted the purse half buried and thought he'd check it out.”

“While he was walking down the street?”

Green raised his head to scan the neighbouring houses. By Rockcliffe standards, they were modest, but security would still be paramount. “Get someone to check for surveillance cameras and photograph this crowd—”

“He wasn't walking,” came a voice at his elbow. He turned in surprise to see a petite woman in a ski jacket and jeans. Her face was a web of wrinkles, her blue eyes grim. “He drove a black pick-up truck.”

“Licence plate?”

She shook her head. “He parked it near the corner. I knew he was up to no good, walking along the snowbank as if he were searching for something. He told me he thought he'd hit a sled or a garbage bin during the storm a few nights ago. I almost called the police.” Her lips tightened. “I wish I had.”

“Would you describe the man for us?”

The woman gave a surprisingly vivid description of a workman in his mid-forties, tall and fit with leathery skin that suggested a lifetime in the sun. But he had three days' growth and baggy eyes which hinted at recent stress. “A working man, uneducated and probably of French origin.”

Green smiled. The perfect witness. Before he could ask how she could be so certain, she smiled grimly. “I'm an artist. It's my job to see behind the face. I can draw him if you like.”

Green took her name and address before sending her off to do just that. He beckoned to a patrol officer who had just arrived. By now, two more cruisers had shown up, along with the Ident van, and Green could see Dr. Alexander MacPhail's black van rounding the corner. He hastily sent the young patrol down to the corner to look for truck tire tracks before anyone flattened them.

MacPhail arrived with his usual drama—booming voice, large boots, white bunny suit and kit of macabre tools for taking temperatures and samples. Ident produced supplies for gridding, excavating and sifting the snow, then erected a tent over the snowbank, mercifully shielding the scene from view. By now the audience had swelled to several dozen, and the media cameras were snapping. Green cursed to himself. In these days of instant communication, the discovery of the body would be up on Twitter and on the twenty-four hour news channels within minutes. The Kennedys and the Longstreets had to be warned.

Doyle seemed to read his mind. “I'll get a unit over to the Kennedys right away.”

“I'll send my man Gibbs over with a photo of the purse. As for Brandon Longstreet—”

“That's easy. He lives near here.” He consulted his phone, which showed a GPS on its screen. “Just a couple of blocks farther up.”

Green's head shot up. If this DOA was Meredith, maybe that's why she was here on this street. She didn't have a car, so she might have got off the bus on Beechwood and cut through here. Had she been on her way to her fiancé's house, or had she just left?

And what did a man in a black pick-up truck who claimed he'd hit a kid's sled have to do with it?

It would be at least an hour before MacPhail and his crew would have news for him. Meanwhile, he'd never met the formidable Elena Longstreet. Now might be the time.

As a poor kid growing up across the Rideau River in Lowertown, Green had concluded long ago that the Village of Rockcliffe Park had been designed to keep the riff raff out. Or at least to get them so thoroughly lost in the higgle piggle of streets that they escaped at the first exit they came across. There was not a vinyl-sided cube to be seen. Massive gabled mansions of stone or brick confronted him at every turn, some behind wrought-iron gates and others at the end of circular drives. Expecting to get lost at least twice en route, he was surprised to find the house exactly where Doyle said it was. One block up and one over—an easy walk up from Beechwood along the road where the victim had been found.

Elena Longstreet's house looked like a dwarf among Goliaths, a one-and-a-half storey brown brick home that had once probably been the gatehouse for a lumber baron's estate. Someone had done a good job of gentrifying it, adding leaded pane windows, intricate black trim and a front door of polished honey oak. Curtains were drawn tightly over the windows to keep prying eyes from seeing inside. A black ornamental fence high enough to discourage intruders surrounded the property, and a two-car garage was partially hidden behind the house. The one jarring note in the tightly sealed façade was the garage door, which gaped open to reveal an empty interior.

Green rang the doorbell and listened to the elegant chimes echo through the house. Nothing. He peered through the small diamond-shaped lead window in the door. The inside vestibule door was wide open, offering him a glimpse of glass-fronted bookcases and terra cotta tiles in the main hall. He rang again. Still no answer, but this time he spotted something familiar hanging from the old-fashioned coat tree standing in the corner of the vestibule. It was a long woollen scarf in an exquisite and distinctive grey cashmere. As he rifled through the images in his memory, his heart began to pound. He had seen that scarf before.

Around the neck of Superintendent Adam Jules.

NINE

W
hen Detective Peters had dropped her bombshell about Meredith's visit to Montreal, Brandon Longstreet's mind had nearly reeled out of control. He had maintained his composure only long enough to see the detective out of the house before he raced upstairs to access his computer.

In passing, he thought of phoning Reg and Norah but dismissed the idea. If hugs and kisses were any indication, Meredith loved her family to pieces, but she didn't confide in them. She hadn't since she was a little girl, because their comfortable, traditional outlook on the world did not welcome her questions or her doubts. Norah still baked pies for the St. Basil parish Christmas bake sale, for God's sake. They didn't disapprove of her wanderlust, exactly, just didn't understand it.

Meredith felt the same estrangement from her cousin Wayne, especially since he married and moved to a four thousand square-foot McMansion in Kanata. Meredith felt an obligation—no, a passion—to save the poor and dispossessed, whereas Wayne played golf with his corporate clients and dropped four thousand dollars on season tickets to the Ottawa Senators. Despite all his business savvy, he didn't have a tenth of Meredith's vision.

Tears blurred Brandon's eyes briefly as he thought of her. A pearl among stones, a woman with a love that encompassed not just him but all humanity and the planet itself. What had she been doing in Montreal? Why had she kept it secret, and what had she discovered there that so altered her course?

Once on the computer, he went straight to Meredith's Facebook page and scoured her recent entries, as well as the comments of others, for details that she might have revealed of her trip. There was not a single mention. Meredith hadn't posted much in recent weeks, and then mostly thank-yous for the good wishes posted by her friends. She had over nine hundred friends. Brandon did a quick search of their locations and found dozens from Montreal. He recognized a couple of distant cousins but most friends were probably Haitians she'd met last year. The limited profiles he could access gave him no further clues. But Facebook friends could have only the most tenuous connections, from a mutual interest in a political cause to shared work ties. None of her Montreal friends had posted on her page in recent weeks.

Brandon sat back in frustration. The trail was cold. What had she been up to, and of all her friends and family, who was the most likely to know?

Reluctantly, unwillingly, his mind kept coming back to his own mother and to the conversation he had overheard earlier that day. What did she know, and what was she determined to keep from him? Did it have something to do with Meredith?

He was no stranger to relationships, but he had never before sensed reluctance on his mother's part. He'd assumed it was because the relationship had moved so fast, from their first meeting eight months ago to the engagement six months later and a quick wedding planned over Christmas. A wedding with none of the extravagant planning and traditional trappings that the mother of an only child might want.

He'd also wondered whether she blamed Meredith for his sudden passion for overseas work. Until last February, he had been pursuing family medicine at the hospital with no thoughts beyond finding a good practice once he'd qualified, but then he'd attended an information session at the Ottawa Hospital about relief work in Haiti. Speakers from the International Red Cross, CARE Canada, the Ministry of Immigration, and Doctors Without Borders had shared stories of tragedy, inspiration and need. There had been hundreds in the audience and at least a dozen speakers, but it was Meredith's passion that caught his eye. She had been sent to Haiti by Immigration to help reunite Haitian Canadians with orphaned island relatives who had lost everything, including identity papers, beneath the rubble. She was supposed to stay a week but had stayed six.

“We live a life of comfort and security most of the world cannot even dream of,” she'd said. “I can't sit at Starbucks sipping my low-fat, double shot latte and texting my friends while in Haiti children sit all day waiting for a single drink of water. If I have to carry that water myself, I will. I am going back.”